Trusted comments, continued

23 Jul 2003

My trusted comments post has generated a few conversations and I'm already starting to miss the ability to easily track them when that happens in such a distributed way (four active places in 24 hours, including yours truly, but the A-list blogger gets it all ;-):

Bill has a pick that is similar to my initial idea, which is twofold: signing comments and bringing them back to my weblog. Signing, IMHO, is merely claiming that the URL (and possibly the email address) I have left along with a comment is mine. Bringing the comment back serves two different purposes: helping me to keep track of the comments I make on other sites and add another feature to my weblog in displaying some of them on the side bar (see the discussions I'm involved in that I find interesting, on other weblogs). I mean this feature as a better way to foster discussions than TrackBacks.

Speaking of which, I have at least one out of my two working neurons that keeps sending signals that TB are worth digging into. There is one handy feature in MT called TrackBack autodiscovery. If, in a post, I link to a page that sports the relevant meta data, my MT server will automagically find that metadata, send a ping to the remote site, and create the TB without me having to do anything else. Suppose that in addition to the current TB metadata, there is one piece of information that says "trusted comment autodiscovery". To comment on that page I would simply login on my weblog (here comes my authentication), click on the "remote comment" button, paste the remote URL I want to comment on and submit my comment. My weblog would then send something resembling to a TB, which the remote weblog would display as a trusted comment. And my own weblog would then have all the information necessary for the tracking/display of that comment on my own weblog.

I think this would be less complicated than implementing solutions based on cryptography or handshakes between servers since most of the mechanic is similar to the existing TrackBack. It also would satisfy my reluctance to rely on a third party.

you're very prompt to ask for TB so you can ping my weblog, but not that prompt when I ask for at least a link back to this post, which I strongly suspect is the source of yours, the previous one not withstanding where you coincidentally dig into the same idea of keeping track of remote comments after reading mine (and again without any link).

I'm not fanatically against one-way trackbacking, but I'm really uncomfortable with the present one.

Using something like TrackBack would make a lot of sense: if you just post your comments from your own blog, the receiving server could verify a code sent with it. This way, you can easily register for every blog automatically.

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